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Tag: Sergio Ermotti

  • UBS Lifts Ex-CEO Sergio Ermotti’s Pay in Final Year

    UBS Lifts Ex-CEO Sergio Ermotti’s Pay in Final Year

    Swiss bank UBS lifted pay for outgoing CEO Sergio Ermotti by nearly 14 percent and granted its new CEO Ralph Hamers a $3.3 million bonus for four months of work.

    Zurich-based UBS paid Sergio Ermotti 14.2 million Swiss francs ($15.4 million) last year, according to its annual report disclosed on Friday, from 12.5 million francs last year. The Swiss banker ran the bank from 2011 until October 31.

    The board of directors recognizes that Sergio Ermotti successfully led UBS through a very challenging year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic,» UBS said in an excerpt of his performance assessment included in the report.

    Ralph Hamers, who took over as CEO of the Swiss wealth manager four months ago, was paid 4.5 million francs, according to the report. At ING, Hamers earned 2.6 million euros ($3.1 million) in 2019, his last full year running the Dutch bank.

    It is common knowledge that Switzerland pays better than wider Europe: Even after a big cut in 2019, Ermotti’s payday made him the top-earning CEO of a listed European bank. Hamers’ UBS bonus last year – 3 million francs – alone is larger than his entire 2019 salary from ING.

    Ralph Hamers has launched a number of strategic initiatives, all with the aim of ensuring the continued long-term success of UBS,» the bank said.

    The unexpected reopening of a criminal investigation into Hamers in the Netherlands puts the Swiss bank on the back foot: it desperately needs its new CEO’s know-how to revitalize, but not with those plans effectively captive to the Dutch legal process, nor at the cost to its reputation.

    UBS had to pay a modest 164,000 francs to «make whole» Hamers – or to compensate him for ING instruments and awards he abandoned to join the Swiss bank. By contrast, it paid Iqbal Khan 8.1 million francs to replace Credit Suisse awards when UBS poached him as private bank co-head in 2019.

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  • Sergio Ermotti Set to Leave UBS

    Sergio Ermotti Set to Leave UBS

    UBS Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti will leave the bank after retiring from his position later this year. He won’t become the chairman of Switzerland’s largest bank, as some observers had expected.

    Instead, Sergio Ermotti on April 17 will stand for election as a non-executive member of the board of Swiss Re, the world’s second-largest reinsurer.

    In 2021, he will be nominated to succeed Walter Kielholz as chairman, according to a statement by Swiss Re on Tuesday.

    Kielholz is one of the heavyweights in Swiss finance and has been chairman of Swiss Re since 2009. He was on the board of the reinsurer for more than 20 years. Between 2003 and 2009, Kielholz was chairman of Credit Suisse.

    I am honored to be following in the footsteps of Walter Kielholz, who over the past decades immensely furthered the development not only of Swiss Re, but the entire Swiss financial center, said Ermotti, according to the statement.

    Today’s announcement put paid to speculation that CEO Ermotti would be replacing Chairman Axel Weber after retiring from his current position at the end of October. When the bank announced Ermotti’s departure at the end of February, it didn’t make a statement about a potential handover of responsibilities at the top of the bank.

    At the end of his tenure at UBS, Ermotti will have been CEO of Switzerland’s biggest bank for nine years. Together with Weber, who was elected chairman of the bank in 2012, he has moved UBS away from the classic investment banking model toward a strategy based on wealth management.

    More recently, the talk had been about differences of opinion at the top as the board was said to be unhappy how Ermotti had set up his succession plan. UBS has not been able to give the share price a boost, which has never recovered from the financial crisis.

    The appointment of Dutch banker Ralph Hamers in February as Ermotti’s successor came as a major surprise. Hamers is known for his digital banking expertise and will need to get UBS ready for the future.

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